I’ve always liked things that are systematic. A good system produces reliable and predictable results. Even simple routines like always putting your car keys in the same place makes life easier because it reduces the chance that you will have to hunt for them, especially when you have the least time to do so. I even like the word “systematic”. When I hear it, I inevitably think of the musical Grease when Danny and the T‑Birds transform an old jalopy into a real ho…

We’ve all heard someone brush off a simple task with, “Come on, it’s not rocket science.” Most of the time that’s true. But every so often we get a reminder of what real rocket science actually looks like. NASA’s recent Artemis II mission was one of those moments. It was a mix of engineering precision, careful planning, and a lot of smart people working together. The mission, as one observer put it, mainly followed mathematical equations and well‑understood scienti…

If you've been investing for any length of time, you've probably heard the phrase “stay the course” more times than you care to remember. Stay the course has been a refrain made popular by the great Jack Bogle to calm investors during rough times in the stock market. It’s become one of those investing clichés that might seem overused, but there’s a reason it’s so commonly repeated: it works. Over my career, I can’t recall a single time when “staying the course” wa…

I wrote previously about The Perfect Portfolio. Spoiler Alert: I contend in the article that there is no such thing as the perfect portfolio.   This is because we can’t foresee the future for investment returns, and we all have different investment needs. Even so, I believe that an investor can build a portfolio that is nearly perfect for them. How would someone go about achieving such a challenging objective? To answer that question, I li…

In the early months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I engaged in many of the same diversions as many of you such as binge watching Netflix shows and surfing YouTube. One of my favorite discoveries was a series of interviews by the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering called In “Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio.” The program’s interviewers were Andrew W. Lo and Stephan R. Foerster, who have also co-written a book by the same title. These in-depth interviews were with…